The City & The City

tracked him without focusing, just legally.

A community of imaginary overlords, exiles perhaps, in most stories machinating and making things so, ruling with a subtle and absolute grip.

“No no, but process of elimination.”

Perhaps there was one thing back then that later schismed on the ruins, or perhaps our ancestral Besźel had not yet met and standoffishly entwined with its neighbour.

We had stolen gudcop and badcop from English, verbed them

My informant should not have seen the posters. They were not in his country. He should never have told me. He made me accessory.

My task is changed: not to uphold the law, or another law, but to maintain the skin that keeps law in place. Two laws in two places, in fact.

It occurred as I led Bowden shuffling with me that the breach I had been empowered to pursue, that I was still investigating and of which he was evidence, was still my own.

Mahalia died because she proved to Bowden that he had been a fool to believe the folktale he created.

The thing is, and I know it wouldn’t work this way and so do you but that’s because no one in this place, and that includes Breach, obeys the rules, their own rules, and if they did it would work this way, the thing is that if you were to be killed by someone who no one was sure which city they were in and they weren’t sure where youwere either, your body would have to lie there, rotting, forever.